Not even Aung San Suu Kyi can fix the world’s longest-running civil war

By Hunter Marston | Washington Post
Hunter Marston is a Southeast Asia analyst at a think tank in Washington, D.C.

In November 2015, the party of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victoryin the country’s first free election in decades. The expectations of her supporters were sky-high. Among the most prominent hopes of her constituents: that the Lady, as she is widely known, could finally end the country’s long-running civil war. Surely if anyone could bring the military to the negotiating table with the myriad armed ethnic groups, it was the revered leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD).

A year and a half later, the odds of achieving national reconciliation appear as slim as at any time in the past six decades. And that bodes ill for a country (also known as Myanmar) whose geopolitical position between China and India makes it a strategic linchpin of its region.

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Princess Elizabeth (Now Queen Elizabeth) her broadcast debut at BBC Studio in London during World War 2

A field loud-speaker is set up to broadcast propaganda to German soldiers, somewhere in Russia, on April 21, 1942.

this photograph of peter and pan was typical of many published by the picture post a british weekly publication during the war showing children contributing to the war effort in this case helping mum while dad was away at the front

Iva Toguri reenacts her wartime radio broadcasts for an Army signal corps film crew.